Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

After Madeleine moved out, she lived in one house or cottage after another. She seemed to be housesitting or caretaking. Then, for a while, after I went back East, she sent me letters in which she said she was not living anywhere, though I did not know what she meant. I always wrote to her at the same post office box number. I visited her only once, when she was in another spacious and handsome house at the top of the hill above our town. That was where the dog, who was very old by then, finally died. Madeleine wrote to me about the death and said that the spirit of the dog was always near her.

After Madeleine left, the house was enlarged. She repeated to me angrily in several different letters that the handsome jade bushes had been cut down. One letter I had from her enclosed a photograph of a necklace she had made. She was wearing the necklace in the picture, I could see her shoulders, but she had cut her face out of it. She told me in the letter that she was living with the cat again, but that she did not like the cat, or any cat. When I wrote back asking for a picture of her that included her face, she sent me three in which she was holding the cat out in front of her at arm’s length toward the camera. The cat, who looked angry, was very large by now.

During the time when the telephone company used to call me, a new, wide bridge was built beside the old narrow one I used to cross toward the racetrack and the fairgrounds. After it was finished and in use, the old one was closed off, then dismantled and removed. I realized that in a few years no one would know it had been there. And if houses were built on the mud flats, as I was sure they would be, everyone would forget that the flats had been bare and brown and that during the fair every year people had parked there, bumping over the ruts.

* * *

The friends who gave the last party I invited him to moved away not long after, so that what I have been imagining, the living room where the party was held, and the front door through which I kept thinking he would come with his girlfriend, as vivid and present to me as if I were still standing there, have changed in a way I can’t imagine, in the hands of other tenants. In fact, not only these friends but almost all the other friends I had in that place have also moved by now, either away from that city and those neighboring towns or out of whatever house they were living in when I knew them there, and some of them I have not visited since, so that I have to imagine those familiar faces within the walls of houses I have never seen.

The living room in which the party took place while I waited all evening for him to appear belongs to the same house in whose back yard the other party took place months earlier, after his reading, in the shade of a lime tree with airplanes flying overhead. But because these two parties were so far apart in time and so different in mood, for me, I find it difficult to bring them close enough together to be located on the same plot of land. He and I entered that back yard party through a gate at the side of the house, without going into the house itself. When we went indoors to get another beer from the refrigerator, we went up a short flight of wooden steps through the back door into the kitchen. Most of the kitchen, though, is not part of my memory of that afternoon but of other visits to the house in which I went to the refrigerator for another beer or looked for a paper towel and didn’t find one or washed some lettuce in a sink that was already full of pots and dishes. That day we did not go on into the dining room, which belongs to other memories, of one evening, or maybe two, spent playing a word game at the large dining table, and of a birthday party at which one of the table legs gave way suddenly and the birthday cake either threatened to slide off and fall onto the floor or actually did.

These memories are sometimes correct, I know, but sometimes confused, a table in the wrong room, though I keep moving it back where it belongs, a bookcase gone and another in its place, a light shining where it never shone, a sink shifting a foot from where it was, even, in one memory, an entire wall absent in order to make the room twice as large. But there is always the same food in the cupboards and on the counters, the same din of voices, and the same shadowy figures of people moving just out of my direct sight.

He might say it was not true that I invited him to that party. He might say he was invited by the people giving the party. I was presuming too much to say he should not come with his girlfriend. He was thinking of my feelings, in the end, when he stayed away.

He could be right. What I remember may be wrong. I have been trying to tell the story as accurately as I can, but I may be mistaken about some of it, and I know I have left things out and added things, both deliberately and accidentally. In fact, he may think that many parts of this story are wrong, not only the facts, but also my interpretations. But there was only what I saw, what he saw, and what other people saw, if they gave it any attention. A handful of them, still, must remember some of this, and if I mentioned it to them they would almost certainly make a remark about it that would show it in an entirely different light or remind me of a horrifying or absurd thing I had forgotten, something that would force me to change everything I have said, if only slightly, if it were not too late.

There are some inconsistencies. I say he was open to me, and I say he was closed to me. I say he was silent with me, and that he was talkative. That he was modest, and arrogant. That I knew him well, and that I did not understand him. I say I needed to see friends, and that I was alone a great deal. That I needed to move very fast, and that I often lay in bed unwilling to move at all. Either all these things were true at different times or I remember them differently depending on my mood now.

* * *

I will want to show the novel to someone before I say it is finished. I may show it to Ellie, even though she knows most of the story already. I will show it to Vincent, but not until I have shown it to someone else who says it is finished. I can’t show it to anyone until I think it is finished myself. And before I show it, I will have to guess what its weak points may be, so that I won’t be taken by surprise.

When Vincent asked me who I was planning to show it to, I mentioned a few names, and he said, “Aren’t you going to show it to any men?” I added another name to the list, because I had not intended to exclude men.

* * *

The last piece of news I heard of him a few months ago, from Ellie, was that he turned up unexpectedly, well dressed or at least formally dressed, in the office of a mutual friend of ours in the city. I don’t remember why he appeared there. I don’t know if Ellie knew and told me or if Ellie did not know. I think it had to do with an odd request, either for a favor or for information. He was working at a hotel at the time.

Now that Ellie is living in the Southwest, she will be less in touch with mutual friends and I will be less likely to hear anything more about him.

* * *

The sun is sitting on top of a hill that I can see beyond the back yard out my bedroom window. If he is on this coast, he may be ending a day’s work just now, since many kinds of work end at five o’clock, or he may be ending something else, like an afternoon of reading in his room. He may be preparing to go out and take a walk in city streets older than the streets on that other coast.

He could just as well be on the other coast, but the very fact that it is two o’clock there, a time of day I don’t like, makes that seem less likely.

* * *

I have not moved the cup of bitter tea from the beginning, so it may make no sense to say that the end of the story is the cup of bitter tea brought to me in the bookstore as I sat in a chair too tired to move after searching so long for his last address. Yet I still feel it is the end, and I think I know why now.